Physical security monitoring and forensics has become a significant concern in the past two decades. With the heightened need for security services in public and private environments, there has been an exponential growth of video information that needs to be reviewed, analyzed and filtered to maintain basic security monitoring. The accelerated pace of security video infrastructure is also placing demands on how to monitor and analyze all the information that is being streamed and stored. Video information is a key component in security and law enforcement to identify and track criminal and suspicious behavior. In most instances, the amount of video footage available at a typical site far exceeds the ability of the manpower needed to review it at the time of occurrence of an event.
In recent cases where the locations are very large and geographically spread out, law enforcement is faced with the considerable task of collecting all video information from all cameras in an area and manually reviewing every frame first to identify the target individuals, then review all videos from earlier time periods to reconstruct their path, and finally stitch together the video stream of an event to reconstruct the entire event. This entire process only captures the immediate aftermath of a given event, providing no clue for intercepting individuals in real time or predicting where they will appear next. It also does not allow for searching archival footage for past visits where the individual in question could be further identified, potential confederates/associates observed, and activities that shed light on preparation work discovered.
Mobile/wireless devices are now commonplace among consumers and are used regularly to search for information, content and data on products and services across all industries. Retail and other enterprise environments can now use information gathered from mobile devices on their premises to engage visitors in more meaningful ways. Providing an entry point for mobile marketing, mobile devices are important to broadcast offers, information and location services to users who are on site or close thereto. However this information has low value if there is no additional information provided about what users are doing on the premise, where they are visiting, what their demographic information is, and pinpointing their needs and interest in a more targeted fashion. Providing an immersive environment where visitors, behavior can be predicted and influenced is a key objective to future retail, restaurant and other service industries.
Users and visitors to retail and other public environments such as transit hubs, hospitals, schools and city streets may be immersed in zones where different types of radio based connectivity and communications points are available. WiFi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, 3G, 4G, LTE and others can provide venues for different means of communication with data and objects around the user. These technologies can provide different forms of information and access to internet data based on smartphone apps, browser based web applications, as well as analysis from visitor metrics collected to identify interests and needs. The providers of these technologies may be carriers, merchants, other enterprises and cities.
These providers can use these technologies to allow local users (both actively or passively) to connect and receive specific information and services in the form of commercial offers, location based services and bandwidth/communications access. The technology providers can collect the user metrics (based on permissions, for example, from their profiles) including social WiFi login details, location and individual demographics for various commercial and customer assistance opportunities. Smartphones and wearable devices (“mobile devices”) broadcast and communicate with this infrastructure providing location information and IDs to the network devices located on the premises around them.
Along with this ID and location information, social media such as Twitter™ and Facebook™ can also be used to provide clues to problem events about to happen or currently taking place at large venues. In light of the above excessive manpower requirements and error-proneness in current physical security monitoring, there is a need for a method and system that can automate real-time monitoring and facilitate post-event forensics by integrating, analyzing, filtering and performing analytics on all of these information that includes streams video, IDs with location, and information from social media.